It's been eight years since Pet Shop Boys played a concert tour on North American soil. That triumphant tour, dubbed 'Performance', was a theatrical event filled with dancers, huge moving sets and exploding clocks.

 Now with the release of 'Nightlife', the duo's seventh studio album of new material (not counting remix, B-side or hits collections), plans are afoot to take North America's concert venues by storm once again.

 The first thing Chris Lowe was adamant to explain over the phone from Florida was that this is the "First WORLD tour we've done in eight years."

 "We've actually done quite a bit of live stuff. We did a tour of Australia and South America, we also played some festivals in Europe and we also did a run of shows at this theatre in London called the Savoy," the latter of which was released on home video and DVD in Europe.

 "So we've been quite busy, but we just haven't been travelling the world."

 While the tour has been eight years in the making, Lowe joked that he and partner Neil Tennant had only two weeks to plan it. Suffice it to say, eight years on, the duo have ammassed a large reportoire of hits and fan and personal favourites.

 Unlike 'Performance' however, which was heavy on singles, the new tour isn't going to showcase the hits. "The set list if just our favourite tracks by us," Lowe said with a mighty laugh.

 "That'll include obscure album tracks and various things. It's all the songs that we really like by us. You do get hits amongst that. If you're a Pet Shop Boys fan, you'll love it."

 The 'Performance' tour was marred by the band's exclusion of fan favourite 'Being Boring', from 1990's 'Behaviour', a move made in part because of the single's lacklustre performance in the charts.

 After their Los Angeles performance of 'Performance' in 1991, Guns N' Roses singer Axl Rose met the duo backstage and complained that they didn't play the lamentable ballad, which was one of his personal favourite songs at the time. It's an oversight that's going to rectified on this tour.

 "We're playing 'Being Boring' as well as 'Only The Wind' [also from Behaviour'], which we've never played before."

 'Performance' was a huge theatrical undertaking, and the Boys reportedly lost a large sum of money on that tour. Lowe admitted that the new show is a much more staid affair, visually.

 "We've been working with an architect called Zaha Hadid. She's a modern British architect and she does this dynamic, futuristic kind of architecture with no right angles and things like that. So she's done the set and then we've got some films and stuff for projection."

 He continued, "The idea is it's a very abstract concept. We're not realizing the songs in a theatrical manner, but we're just presenting more of an abstract experience, really."

 Musically, Lowe explained that with new musical director Peter Schwartz, the songs are getting a much need updating and reprogramming.

 "We've still kept the original flavour of the songs, but it's all a bit more updated. We hadn't really changed our programming since the songs were done a long time ago. Anyway, they sound really fresh now. We've even redone 'It's Alright'".

 As with shows of this nature, in which technology plays such an integral part, the unexpected can always happen. Lowe admitted that it can cause some tense moments when you're not really sure if things will work or not.

 "Last time we toured, 'Go West' was triggered using step-time code from the film and it was on a rickety old projector and so some time you hear this big crash and you'd hear all the instruments just go "boomf", like that and you'd be 'Oh, here we go' and we'd have to rewind it to the start again. It gave the show a bit of tension," he admits, laughing, "not knowing whether it would work or not."

 The Pet Shop Boys tour hits two Canadian cities, Toronto and Montreal, during the North American jaunt before heading back to Europe.